"Soutter and others vs. Hayley and others.—This somewhat remarkable railroad case closed yesterday, and the complaint was dismissed. Judge L——, in granting the motion for a dismissal, took occasion to remark that he had seldom performed a more painful duty. That the railroad company had been defrauded to the extent of not less than eighty thousand dollars by Burton Hayley, the contractor, was one of the conclusions—the learned judge said—in which all would unfortunately agree. But the operation had been managed with great skill, and legal evidence of what was morally certain had not been produced. He should therefore grant the motion, with the regret expressed, and with the hope that in a future prosecution the evidence which was certainly demanded might be forthcoming, and the defrauded company at least find themselves in a position to punish the wrong-doer. We hear it stated, upon authority which seems reliable, that Hayley has heretofore been known as a reliable man, and that he has undoubtedlybeen urged to steps which he must regret during his whole life, even if justice does not reach him, or conscience compel him to make restitution,—by the demands made upon him in behalf of a ruinously expensive family, and by evil advice which he has no doubt received from the same quarter. Hayley will probably leave Harrisburgh at once, to enjoy what may be left of his ill-gotten gains in some locality where his antecedents are less fully understood."
"Soutter and others vs. Hayley and others.—This somewhat remarkable railroad case closed yesterday, and the complaint was dismissed. Judge L——, in granting the motion for a dismissal, took occasion to remark that he had seldom performed a more painful duty. That the railroad company had been defrauded to the extent of not less than eighty thousand dollars by Burton Hayley, the contractor, was one of the conclusions—the learned judge said—in which all would unfortunately agree. But the operation had been managed with great skill, and legal evidence of what was morally certain had not been produced. He should therefore grant the motion, with the regret expressed, and with the hope that in a future prosecution the evidence which was certainly demanded might be forthcoming, and the defrauded company at least find themselves in a position to punish the wrong-doer. We hear it stated, upon authority which seems reliable, that Hayley has heretofore been known as a reliable man, and that he has undoubtedlybeen urged to steps which he must regret during his whole life, even if justice does not reach him, or conscience compel him to make restitution,—by the demands made upon him in behalf of a ruinously expensive family, and by evil advice which he has no doubt received from the same quarter. Hayley will probably leave Harrisburgh at once, to enjoy what may be left of his ill-gotten gains in some locality where his antecedents are less fully understood."
Mrs. Burton Hayley had sunk back into her chair at the moment when Margaret read the first words, and she remained silent till the close. Her face was white, except that a single red spot burned in the very centre of either cheek. Her daughter looked steadily upon her for an instant after she had concluded. Still neither spoke. The mother's eyes had in them something of that baleful light shown by the orbs of a wild beast when driven to its corner; and they, with the crimson spotted cheeks, were not pleasant things to look upon. At last Margaret asked:
"Did you ever hear of this before? Was that man my father?"
"What of it? Yes!" The words were nearer spat out than spoken. Margaret glanced, perhaps involuntarily, at the ostentatious Bible on its carved stand.
"Was that money ever repaid to the railroad company?"
For just one instant the lips of Mrs. Burton Hayley moved as if she was about to utter a falsehood little less black than the original crime had been. If she had for that instant intended to do so, she thought better of it and jerked out: "How should I know? I suppose there is no use in telling a lie about it, toyou! No!"
"So I thought!" said Margaret Hayley. "That eighty thousand dollars, then, has been standing for fifteen years, and the interest upon it would nearly double the sum. We owe that railroad company, or so many members of the original company as may be yet alive, not less than one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. We have only an hundredthousand or a very little more, but that will be something. Of course, after what you have just said of the curse that clings to ill-gotten gain, you will join me in paying over every dollar in our possession, at once."
Mrs. Burton Hayley sprang up from her chair with more celerity than she had before exhibited. "Margaret Hayley, are you a born fool?" she almost screamed.
"No, nor a bornhypocrite!" the young girl replied. Again her eyes went round to the Bible, and those of the mother followed hers as if they were compelled by a charm. Then those of the latter drooped, and they did not rise again as she said, in a much lower voice:
"You know the secret. I am in your power. But I am your mother, and it may be quite as well for you to be merciful to me as well as to yourself. Upon what terms will you give me that paper and promise never to speak of it or of the affair to any one without my consent?"
"I will not give you the paper uponanyterms!" was the answer. "That has been my shame and my torture for five years, and must still accompany me. But I will be your accomplice in crime and make the promise you require, on three conditions and those only.First, that you drop all hypocrisy when speaking tome, whatever you may do before the world.Second, that you never speak one disrespectful word of Carlton Brand, again, in my hearing. He is dead to me: let your hatred of him die with him, or at least let me hear no word of it.Third, that you urge no person upon me as a husband. Present me whom you please—throw me into any company you wish; but say not one word to force me into marriage with Hector Coles or any other person. This will not break my heart—I know it. I shall marry some time, no doubt, when I find the man who can supply that place in my heart which has to-day been left empty,—without any foible or weakness to make him an unfit match for my ownstainlessblood!"
There was a bitter emphasis upon the penultimate word,and Mrs. Burton Hayley distinctly recognized it. She recognized, too, the somewhat singular prophecy made by a young girl on the very day of her final parting with the man she had loved so dearly—thatshe would yet find another to fill her heart more completely. Most young persons think very differently at the moment of the great first sorrow, believe that the vacant niche can never be filled, and make painful promises of hopeless lives and celibacy, to cancel those promises some day amid blushes of regret or peals of laughter. Mrs. Burton Hayley recognized the singularity then, and she may have had reason to recall that prophecy at another day in the near future.
But there was yet something that she must do, to seal that treaty of which her daughter was the dictator. Her own compact was to be made: she made it.
"I will do as you wish, Margaret. They are hard terms to set, toyour mother; but I accept them."
"Very well, then. We understand each other, now; and I hope there will never be another painful word between us. I will try to speak none, and for both our sakes I hope you will be as careful. Now leave me, please. I will draw to this other shutter, for I need darkness, silence and rest—yes, rest!"
The closed blind left the room in almost total dusk. The mother left the room, stepping slowly and appearing to bear about with her a dim consciousness that within the past half-hour her relative position with her daughter had been most signally changed. Margaret Hayley threw herself once more on the sofa, buried her fevered brow and her dishevelled hair in the soft, cool, white pillow, and sought that wished-for "rest." Alas! no tyrant ever invented a torture-bed so full of weary turnings and agonized prayers for deliverance or oblivion, as the softest couch whereon young love, suddenly and hopelessly bereft, reaches out its arms in vain, finds emptiness, and falls back despairing—moaning for the lost twin of its soul! The agony may be all forgotten to-morrow,in the sunshine, and the intoxication of music, and the voices of friends, and the far-off dawning of a new passion; but oh, what is the martyrdom of to-night.
The third and last of these supplementary scenes, occurring at nearly the same period in the afternoon as the second, has its location at the house of Robert Brand, and a part of it in the same room where we have before seen the testy invalid while receiving the news of his son's defection and disgrace.
Robert Brand was once more back in his easy-chair, his injured limb again propped on the pillows, and his face showing all those contortions of extraordinary pain likely to be induced by his imprudent ride and the agitation attending it. Satisfied, now, that his son was not dead, the tender father had again died out in him; but made aware by a succession of facts, which he could neither understand nor doubt, that that son, just characterized, even by himself, as a hopeless coward, had since that time been fighting, and fighting without any evidence of cowardice, in a species of hand-to-hand conflict likely to try the courage quite as seriously as the shock of any ordinary battle,—he was mentally in a state of confusion on the young man's account, altogether unusual with him and not a little painful. He did not curse any more, or at least no more of his curses were aimed at the head of his son.
Poor little Elsie had been left without a hope of reconciliation between her father and her brother, after the hurling of that wild and wicked curse and the exile from his home which it involved. But the episode of the supposed death had made a diversion in Carlton's favor; her father had returned from the search for his son's body, worried and unsettled if not mollified; and the affectionate soul thought that the opportunity might be a favorable one for securing the reversal of the cruel sentence, with concealment from her brother that any such words had ever been uttered, and hiseventual return home as if nothing painful or unpleasant had occurred. "Blessed are the peace-makers!" says very high authority; and most blessed of all are those who, like little Elsie, ignoring their own suffering and ill-treatment, strive to bring together the divided members of a once happy household!
But the little girl was not half aware how stubborn was the material upon which she was trying to work, or how deeply seated was the feeling of mortification which had embittered the whole nature of the man who held cowardice to be the most unpardonable of vices.
"Hold your tongue, girl!" was the severe reply to her suggestion that there might be some mistake, after all—that poor Carlton had enemies, and they had no doubt labored to place him in a false position—and that he would be sorry, to the last day he lived, if when Carlton returned home, as he probably would do that night if nothing serious had really happened to him, he should say one word to drive him away again, to leave himself without a son, and her without a brother. "Hold your tongue, girl! You are a little fool, and do not know what you are talking about. If you do not wish to follow your brother, you had best not meddle any more in the relations which I choose to establish with a son who has disgraced himself and me!"
"But suppose poor Carltonshouldbe dead, after all, father? Who knows but some stranger may have come by in a wagon, seen the body lying on the ground, picked it up and carried it away to the Coroner's?"
"Eh! What is that you say?" For the instant Robert Brand was startled by the suggestion and his heart sunk as well as softened at the recurring thought that his son might indeed be dead. But the thought was just as instantaneous, how general was the objection to touching an unknown dead body, and how unlikely that any such course should have been adopted by strangers, while any acquaintance, removing the body at all, would certainly have brought it home to hisown house. No—he was alive; and that belief was once more full in the mind of Robert Brand as he said:
"What do I care if heisdead! I believe I could forgive him better, if I knew that he was, and that I should never again set eyes on the likeness of a man with the soul of a cat or a sheep! If he is alive, as I believe he is, let him never come near this house again if he does not wish to hear words said that he will remember and curse the last thing before he dies!"
A sharp spasm of pain concluded this unhallowed utterance, and words followed that have no business on this page. Elsie Brand fired again, when she found all her pleading in vain, and broke out with:
"You are a miserable heartless old wretch, and I have a great mind to go out of this house, this very moment, and never come into it again as long as I live, unless you send for me to come back with my brother!"
"Go, and the quicker the better!" writhed the miserable man, in the midst of a spasm of pain. "If I hear one more impertinent word out of you, youwillgo, whether you wish to go or not, and you will never come back again unless you come on your knees!"
What might have been the next word spoken by either, and whether that next word might not indeed have wrought the separation of father and daughter, no one can say. For at that moment came a fortunate interruption, in the sound of carriage wheels coming rapidly up the lane, and easily heard through the open doors—then the furious barking of a dog, the yell of a woman's voice, and a volley of fearful curses poured out from the rougher lips of a man. Elsie, alarmed, but perhaps rather glad than otherwise to have the threatening conversation so suddenly ended, rushed out of the room, through the parlor, to the front piazza, where she joined the general confusion with a scream of affright, hearing which, the invalid, who had before, more than once that day, proved how superior the mind could be to the disablements of thebody, hurled one more oath at the people who would not even allow him to suffer in quiet, started again from his chair, grasped his heavy cane and stumped hurriedly to the door, writhing in agony and half crazed with pain and vexation. There the sight which had the instant before met the eyes of his daughter, met his own, though the effect produced by it upon himself was so very different that instead of screaming he dropped against the lintel of the front door in a loud explosion of laughter.
There was a horse and buggy in the lane, very near the gate—the horse unheld, rearing and squealing, but making no attempt to run away as might have been expected. Close beside the vehicle, a man easily recognizable as Dr. Philip Pomeroy, was engaged in a hand-to-hand (or is it hand-to-mouth?) conflict with Carlo, the big watch-dog, using the butt of his whip, the lash of it, his boots, and any other weapon of offence in his possession, against the determined assaults of the powerful brute that really seemed disposed to make a meal of the man of medicine. The doctor fought well, in that new revival of the sports of the Roman arena, but he was terribly bested (by which it is only intended to use an old word of the days of chivalry, and not to make an atrocious pun uponbeast-ed;) and just at the moment when Robert Brand's eyes took in all the particulars of the scene, the human combatant, following up a temporary advantage, lunged ahead a little too far, lost his balance or caught his foot, and went headlong on the top of the dog, the contest being thereafter conducted on the ground and in the partial obscurity of the fence. At the same instant, too, the tall, bare-headed and bare-armed figure of old Elspeth Graeme appeared from behind the corner of the house, and the voice of that Caledonian servitor was heard screaming out:
"Here, Carlo! Here, lad! coom awa, ye daft deevil! Here! here! coom awa, lad!"
Elsie joined with a feeble "Here, Carlo!" from the piazza; and Robert Brand, if he could have found voice, would probablyhave assisted in calling off the dog; but Carlo, a formidable animal in size, black, with a few dashes of white, compounded of the Newfoundland and the Mount St. Bernard, with a surreptitious cross of the bull-dog (such immorality has been known even in canine families, to the great regret of precisian dog-fanciers)—Carlo had no idea whatever of "throwing up the sponge," (which with a dog consists, we believe, in dropping his tail), and might have fought on until death, doomsday, or the loss of his teeth from old age, arrived to stop him—had not Elspeth closed in with a "Hech! ye born deevil! Ye'll aye be doin' more than ye'r tauld!" grasped the huge animal by the nape of the neck, and dragged him away very much as if she had been dealing with a kitten.
Thus relieved, the doctor recovered his feet; but he was—as Elspeth described him in a communication made not long after—"a sair lookin' chiel!" He had lost his hat, dusted his coat, and found a sad rent in one leg of his nether garments, not to mention the rage which flashed in his eye and almost foamed from his mouth. For the first moment after the rescue he seemed to have a fancy for "pitching into" old Elspeth, unreasonable as such a course would have been after her calling off the dog and finally lugging him off by main force; and he did hurl after her an appellation or two which might have furnished a rhyme to the name of the Scottish national disease; but the stout serving woman quelled him with this significant threat, and went on her way, dragging the dog towards his kennel in the backyard:
"'Deed, if ye can't keep a ceevil tongue in yer heid, I'll no be holdin' the tyke awa from ye a bit langer, and he'll eat ye up, I doubt!"
At that juncture the discomfited doctor caught sight of Robert Brand and his daughter, in the door and on the piazza, and he strode in to them without further ado, whip still in hand, rage still in his face, and threatening enough in his manner to indicate that he intended to cowhide so many of the family as he could find, male and female.
"Who let out that infernal dog?" was his first salutation, without first addressing either the old man or his daughter by name.
"He must have broken loose, himself. Indeed, Doctor, we are so sorry—" began little Elsie, who had really been frightened out of her wits, and who had that organ unknown to the phrenologists, called Hospitality, very largely developed.
"Hold your tongue, girl, and let me attend to my own business!" was the surly interruption of the invalid father, who had stopped laughing, and who had at that juncture a very low development of the corresponding organ. "We are not sorry at all. Dr. Pomeroy, I told you this morning, when I ordered you out of this house, never to come near it again; and you had better paid attention to the order."
"Thenyouhad that dog set loose!"
"That is a lie!" was the response. The doctor, who had used the same expression in a still more offensive form, not long before, was getting the chalice returned to his lips at very short notice. And the old man, in denying the act, intended to tell the exact truth—he had not turned the dog loose, or set him upon the doctor, except secondarily. Some hours before, when the medical man had just been dismissed for the first time, he had told the Scottish woman that 'he would bundle her out, neck and crop, if she did not set the dog on that man if he ever came near the house again!' and she had promised to obey his orders: that was all! Carlo, a dear friend of his young master, had always hated the doctor, who was his enemy, and never passed without snapping and growling at him; and the old woman well knew the fact. Consequently, when she saw the buggy dashing up the lane, and recognized it, she had religiously kept her promise, darted round to the kennel, unloosed the dog and directed his attention to the obnoxious individual, with a "Catch him, laddie!" that sent him flying at the doctor's throat just as he stepped to the ground. And it was only when the oldwoman believed the punishment going a little too far and the victim likely to be eaten up in very deed, that she had interposed and dragged the enraged brute from his prey. All this was unknown to both father and daughter, who merely supposed that the dog had broken loose at that awkward moment; and Robert Brand's disclaimer, though a very uncourteous one, had the merit of truth. But the doctor, just then enraged beyond endurance, literally "boiled over" at the word.
"I lie, do I?" he foamed. "If you were not a miserable cripple, I would horse-whip you on your own door-step, old as you are!"
"Oh, Doctor! oh, father!" pleaded the frightened Elsie, who did not know what might be coming after this.
"Hold your tongue, girl!" again spoke Robert Brand, who still stood leaning against the lintel of the door. "Horsewhip me, would you, you poisoning Copperhead! If I could not beat out your brains with this stick, I could set a woman at you who would take you across her knee and spank you till you were flat like a pancake!"
Dr. Pomeroy thought of the woman who had dragged off the dog, and had some doubts whether she could not indeed do all that her master promised. He seemed to have the luck, that day, to fall into the way of people sturdy of arm and strong of will!
"What do youwanthere?" was the inquiry of the old man, before the doctor could answer again, and remembering that there might be some special errand upon which he had a right to come.
"You have remembered it, have you?" was the response. "Well, then, I want your thief of a son! Is he in this house?"
"Oh, he was a coward this morning: now he is a thief, is he? What do you want of him?"
"He committed theft at my house not more than an hourago; and I am going to find him if he is in the State. Once more—is he here?"
"What did he steal?" asked the father with a sneer, while poor Elsie stood nearly fainting and yet unable to move from the spot, at that new charge against her brother.
"A woman." Elsie felt relieved; the old man sneered.
"Well, I can only say that if he took away any woman belonging toyou, he must have a singular taste!"
"Robert Brand"—and the doctor spoke in a tone of low and concentrated passion—"once more and for the last time I ask you whether your son is in this house, with Eleanor Hill, my—my adopted daughter, in his company."
"Eleanor Hill!" gasped Elsie, but no one heard her.
"Dr. Pomeroy," answered Robert Brand, "you do not deserve any answer except a blow, but I will give you one. My son, as you call him, Carlton Brand, is not here, and will never be here again while I live, unless to be thrust out like a dog. How many girls he has, or where he conceals them, is none of my business, oryours! Now go, if you know when you are well off, for as sure as God lets me live, if I ever see you approaching this house again, I will shoot you from the window with my own hand."
Something in the tone told Dr. Pomeroy that both the assertion and the threat were true. He turned without another word, stepped to his buggy, mounted into it and drove away.
"He is alive, father—thank God!" said Elsie Brand, reverently, when the unwelcome visitor had disappeared and she was assisting the invalid back to his chair of suffering. That one assurance had been running through her little head, putting out all other thoughts, since the remark of the doctor that Carlton had been at his house not an hour before.
"He is as dead to me as if he had been buried ten years!" was the reply of the implacable father, who stood in momentary peril of the grave from some sudden turn of his disease, and yet who had not even taken that first step towards preparation for the Judgment, comprised in pity and forgiveness!
Before and after Gettysburgh—The Apathy and Despair which preceded, and the Jubilation which followed—What Kitty Hood said after the Battle, and what Robert Brand—Brother and Sister—A guest at the Fifth Avenue Hotel—A fire-room Visit, an Interview, and a Departure for Europe.
Before and after Gettysburgh—The Apathy and Despair which preceded, and the Jubilation which followed—What Kitty Hood said after the Battle, and what Robert Brand—Brother and Sister—A guest at the Fifth Avenue Hotel—A fire-room Visit, an Interview, and a Departure for Europe.
It was a dark day for the nation—perhaps none darker!—that day of late June, 1863, marked by the occurrence of the preceding events. Private interests, private wrongs, private sorrows seemed all to be culminating or laying down fearful material for culmination in the future; but those domestic convulsions were only a faint and feeble type of that great throe agitating the whole nation. That day the bravest feared, not for themselves but for the country they loved; and that day the miserable trucklers who would long before have had the republic veil its face and sink on its knees before the arrogance of rebellion, begging for "peace" with dishonor, instead of demanding and enforcing victory,—that day they experienced such a triumph as they had never before known and such as their narrow souls could scarcely appreciate. "We told you so!" rung out from the throat of every "conditional loyalist," as the same paltry exultation had rung many an age before against the unsubmitting tribunes by the mad populace when the Volscians threatened to devastate Rome—as it had been yelled into the ears of Philip Van Artevelde and his brother defenders, when Ypres and Bruges fell, and the fierce Earl of Flanders promised death to the burghers of Ghent; and there was little, except bald defiance, that loyal men could reply. That long-boasted "invasion of the North" had come at last; and there is always a disheartening effect in the drawing of war nearer to the doors it has heretofore spared, even as there is always a scum among anypopulation, ready to cry "ruin!" and counsel "submission" or "compromise" when a single move in the great game of war has ended disastrously.
A more dreary spectacle than Philadelphia presented during some of the days of that week, cannot very well be imagined. From Harrisburgh and many of the minor towns of the west and southwest of the State, the inhabitants had fled by thousands to other places supposed to be less easily within reach of the enemy; and, if in a future day of peace those who at this juncture took part with the rebellion should chance to be shamed with a reminder of the panic in Richmond, and the removal of the Confederate archives, after Hanover Court-House in 1862, they may very pleasantly retaliate by calling up the panic at Harrisburgh and the packing up of the Pennsylvania State records, after York and Carlisle in 1863. Hundreds of wealthy persons removed their valuables even to Philadelphia; and there is no guarantee whatever that many of them did not make a still further removal East, when they could do so without attracting disagreeable attention and running the chance of after ridicule.
There seemed to be an impression just then, in fact, that there was no power whatever to check the disciplined but half-starved and desperate rebel hordes. Even those who did not view the affair as any matter of gloom or discouragement, still believed it one of heavy loss that must be submitted to with the best grace possible.
One of the young Philadelphia merchants was recognized by a friend, on one of the very last days of June, knocking about the balls in the billiard-room of the Cattskill Mountain House, and questioned by him as to the propriety of his being away from the Quaker City at a time when so heavy a misfortune as the rebel advance to the Delaware seemed to be impending.
"Oh," said the merchant, making an eight-shot at the same moment, "I do not see any good that I could do by staying."
"And do you not believe that the rebels will reach Philadelphia?" asked the friend.
"Well, yes, I rather think they will," answered the nonchalant. "I should not be surprised if they should reach there to-morrow. In fact I telegraphed to my partner from Albany, yesterday, whenever they had taken Harrisburgh to pack up the most valuable of our goods and send them to New York."
"And when they have taken New York?" asked the interrogator, not a little amused at that new system of defending valuable property and the country.
"Oh," said the merchant, as he sighted another shot and made his carom without the tremor of a pulse—"when they take New York, as I suppose they will in a week or two, we shall move them to Boston, and so keep on working East till they drive us into Canada or the Atlantic."
And this was not all a jest, by any means. The player had so telegraphed, and he more than half believed that his goods were at that time in course of removal, while he had no thought whatever of deserting his billiard-table and going down to assist in defending them. He was not alone, meanwhile, in his reprehensible coolness, as history will be at some pains to record of that extraordinary crisis.
Philadelphia presented many strange spectacles on those days. Apart from the blowing of a brass band on every corner, the patrolling of every sidewalk by a recruiting officer with fife and drum, and the requisite number of human "stool-pigeons," and the exhibition of the placard before noted, offering every inducement in money and every plea of patriotism for "State defence,"—there were other and yet more marked indications of a period out of the common order even for war-time. The American and the Merchants', favorite resorts of mercantile buyers from the rural counties of the State, were full of guests, but they lounged in the reading and smoking-rooms, and had no thought of commercial transactions. Gold was going up, its higher ratemarking increased fever in the pulse of the national patient; and yet business was almost as stagnant in the broker's offices of Third Street as were wholesale transactions in the heavy houses on Walnut and Chestnut and Market below Second. The old Tonawanda and the still older Saranac, lying idle at the foot of Walnut Street, their yards lank and bare as winter trees, and the ships waiting for freight that seemed to be long in coming, found a new use in illustrating the hopeless stagnation of the city. The theatres had nearly all closed before, and the last hurried its unprofitable season to an end. The red bricks of old Independence Hall seemed more dingy than ever; and those who glanced into the hall where the great Declaration was signed in Seventy-six, at the cracked bell and the other sad reminders of a past age and a by-gone patriotism, thought whether new masters would not claim those relics for their own, before many days, issuing a new manifesto of slavery from that second Cradle of Liberty, while their gaunt steeds were picketed in Independence Square. Men saw the sleepless eye of the clock look down from the old steeple, at night, with a helpless prayer, as if something of protection which had before lived in the sacred building was to be found no more; and the bell woke many a sleeper at midnight, with its slow and melancholy stroke, to a feeling of loss and sorrow like that which it might have evoked when sounding for the burial of dear friends. All day long crowds gathered and held their place, wearily moving to and fro, but never dispersing, in the open space in front of the historic pile; and "peace" orators, who had before been awed into silence by the threats and demonstrations of earlier days, once more ventured treasonable harangues to sections of those crowds, while the policemen scarcely found energy enough to disperse the hearers or arrest the disturbers. The bulletin boards were besieged; the newspaper offices had a demand for extras unknown to the oldest inhabitant of the quiet city; and the telegraph offices, busied alike with messages of public and private interest, had neverbefore known such a test of their capacity since Morse first set Prometheus at his new occupation of a messenger. A few troops marched away, the Reserves (with Dick Compton in their ranks) among the number; and the New York militia regiments and some of the New Jersey troops passed through on their third campaign for "home defence;" but the public mind was not reassured. Once there was a rumor that McClellan had been called again to the command of the Army of the Potomac, or at least entrusted with the defence of the State, and then the general pulse for the moment beat wildly; but the inspiriting report died away again, the non-arrival of the morning train from Harrisburgh one day threw the whole city into panic, and the thought of successfully defending the State capital sunk lower than ever. The President, who had been bespoken to meet the Loyal Leagues and raise a new flag on Independence Hall on the Fourth of July, was too busy or too much discouraged, and would not come; and what heart lacked an excuse for sinking down when so much was threatened and so little spirit shown for meeting the great peril?
This was the week preceding the Fourth; and in that week, which closed with the National Anniversary, what changes had taken place! The time and its vicissitudes seemed to be an exact offset to the hopes and the disappointments of the same period of 1862. Then, the Army of the Potomac had lain before Richmond, and the Fourth was to have seen the old flag waving in the rebel capital. It had really seen the little General driven back upon the James, and repulsed if not hopelessly defeated. The Fourth of 1863 was to see Harrisburgh in the hands of the rebels, and the national cause sunken lower than it had before been since the advent of the secession. What did it really see? Thank God for a few such hours as those of the close of the Fourth, in the midst of whole centuries of loss and disappointment! All was changed—all was saved! Meade, a man of whom but few knew any thing more, a week earlier, than that he was abrave man, a good fighting General, and a brother of the overslaughed Captain Dick Meade, of the North Carolina—Meade had arisen in doubt and culminated in glory. Bloodiest and most important of all the battles of the Continent, Gettysburgh stood already upon the pages of the National history, soaked with the blood of the bravest—holy with the bravery and the energy which had there broken and rolled back the tide of invasion, and yet to be holier still as the Cemetery of the Battle-Dead of the Republic. Orators who began their Fourth of July addresses with only their pulses of anxiety stirred by the knowledge that there had been three days fighting, that Reynolds was killed, and that the conflict seemed to have been desperate and undecided, did not close them before they knew that the great victory was won, that Meade was to be thenceforth a name of honor in the land, that Lee and his hordes were in disastrous retreat, and that the "invasion of the North" was at an end for all the time covered by this struggle. The news of Vicksburg was soon to come, another crowning glory for the Fourth, though not known for days after, and Grant was to be a third time canonized. But just then there was enough without Vicksburg, and the nation might have gone mad over the double tidings had they come at once.
Who, that has one drop of patriotic blood surging in his heart, can ever forget the reading of those "victory extras" that flew wide over the land on Saturday night and Sunday morning—the quavering voices of the readers, the reddening cheeks and flashing eyes of the hearers? Never before did so much seem to have been won, because never before did so much seem to have been perilled. And Philadelphia, that had sunken lowest in despondency of any of the great cities, naturally rose highest when the word of victory came. Bells rung, flags waved, music sounded, gas blazed like the noonday, processions paraded, business revived as if Trade had a human form and a crushing weight had suddenly been lifted from its breast, and old Independence Hall once more boomed its belland flashed over the city its midnight eye of fire, as if its defiance to tyranny and treason had never faltered for a moment.
It was of Gettysburgh that Kitty Hood had been reading, at her little cottage home near the great road, after her return from church on Sunday the fifth of July, when she dashed away the tears of agitation and anxiety that had been gathering in her eyes, and said:
"Dick Compton was right, after all, and I was a fool to try to keep him away! If he had obeyed me, I should have despised him now; and if he has not been killed in that terrible battle and lives to come home again, I will tell him how wrong I was, and what a ninny I made of myself, and how sorry I am for every word I spoke that day, and how much better I love him because he obeyed the call of his country instead of the poor, weak, miserable voice of a frightened woman!"
And it was of Gettysburgh and the desperate fighting around Cemetery Hill that Robert Brand had been reading, on the same Sunday afternoon, sitting in the shade of his own piazza, when he hurled out these bitter words, which poor little Elsie heard as she lay upon the lounge in the parlor within:
"This is what he has lost, the low-lived, contemptible poltroon!My son, and to shirk a great battle! He might have been dead now, and in a grave better than any house in which he can ever hide his miserable life; or he might have had something to remember and boast of all his days—that he was one of the Men of Gettysburgh! If I had two legs, I would go out and find him yet and shoot him with my own hand—the infernal cowardly cur!"
And then the disgraced and irate father tried to forget his son and to bury himself in other details of the great battle.
The sister did not reply aloud to her father's renewed objurgation. She merely sobbed a little and took from herbosom a crumpled note and read it over again for perhaps the fiftieth time, muttering low as she did so:
"Oh, father, father! If you knew how far you would need to go to seek poor Carlton and make him even more miserable than he is, and how little chance you have of ever seeing him again while you live—perhaps you would not speak so cruelly of him." Then she kissed the crumpled note again and put it back into her bosom, and tried to compose herself once more to that sleep which the tropical heat invited and her aching heart forbade.
From the tone of that letter, it would seem that Elsie had written to her brother, to his place of business in the city, when fully aware of the unreasonable indignation which moved her father, advising him not to risk serious personal insult by coming home until he should again hear from her,—and that he had replied, from a place much farther away, informing her of his intention to put seas between himself and the eyes of all who had looked upon his disgrace. But better even this long separation—thought the young girl—than a return which would induce words between father and son, never to be forgiven or forgotten while either held life and memory. Years might mellow the recollection and change the feeling—years when the country should no longer make demands upon her children to breast the battle storm in her behalf, and when the eloquent voice in the halls of justice and the active, busy life in deeds securing the common welfare, might be sufficient to win new honor and blot away any recollection of that single sad misstep in the career of manhood. Poor, gentle, loving, faithful little Elsie Brand!—it may be long before we have occasion to look upon her again, and indeed she becomes henceforth but a comparative shadow; so let it be put upon record here that she seemed "faithful among the faithless" in practising the great lessons of hope and charity. The father might utter curses to be set down against his own soul in the day when human words as well as human actions must be called into judgment; friends mightlook askance and enemies gloat over the disgrace of one who had before stood high above them in all the details of honorable character; even the sweetheart, whose pulses had once beaten so close to his that the twin currents seemed flowing into one—even she might find some poor excuse of pride to falsify her by-gone boast that she loved him better than all the world, and let that hollow, wordy "honor" work their eternal separation: all this might be, but thesisterhad no such license to waver in the course of her affection towards one who had been fondled by the same hands in babyhood and drawn sustenance from the same maternal bosom as herself. And no treason, all this, to the truths and the eternities of other loves. All other relations may sooner change than that which binds sister and brother, whose fondness has not been tainted by some falsehood in blood or chilled by some wrong in education. Wife or mistress, yesterday cold, may be to-day throbbing with the most intense warmth of absorbing passion, and to-morrow chilled again by instability in herself or unworthiness in the object of her regard: even the mother, that tenderest friend of song and story and sometimes of real life, may scatter her affections wide among so many children that each has but the pauper's share, or form new ties and forget that ever the old existed. But the brother, if he be not the veriest libel upon that sacred name, clings with undying fondness to the sister; and the sister, ever faithful, clings to the brother "through evil and through good report," when one or even both may have become a scoff and a bye-word in every mouth that opens to speak their names. Happy those men for whom the bond has never been either frayed or broken: sad for those who ever look back through the long years and see some sunny head of childhood hiding itself beneath the falling clods of the church-yard, that might have nestled closer to them in after years than all whom they have grasped, and cherished, and chilled, and lost!
It now becomes necessary to inquire the whereabouts of Carlton Brand, the subject of so much sisterly love and somuch fatherly indignation, at that second period when Gettysburgh was a glorious novelty, its bloody splendors flashing broad over the loyal States. And those whereabouts may very readily be discovered. On the register of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, in the city of New York, his name had been inscribed on the Wednesday evening previous to Gettysburgh (the first day of July); and those among our readers who may have chanced to be sojourners at the Fifth Avenue during that week, and who will take the trouble to read over again the close and accurate description given of the lawyer on his first appearance in the presence of his sister and Margaret Hayley, in the second chapter of this narration, may not find much difficulty in remembering the appearance of so marked a man at the hotel at that period—the glances of admiration cast upon his handsome face and manly figure as he sat at table or moved quietly among the ever-changing crowd in the reading-room or down the long halls—the almost total silence which he maintained, seeming to have no acquaintances or to be anxious for escape from all conversation—his inquiring more than once every day at the office for letters which continually disappointed him—and the expression of drooping-eyed melancholy in face and restless unquiet in movement, which gave rise to many side remarks and led to many singular speculations.
He was alone—at least alone at the hotel; and Dr. Pomeroy, if he had entertained any actual belief in his suggested elopement between the lawyer and his "ward," might easily have satisfied himself, had he followed him to the commercial metropolis, that no such elopement had taken place or that the abductor had hidden his paramour carefully away and managed to keep continually out of her presence.
Something indescribably dim and shadowy grows about the character and action of Carlton Brand at this time; and the writer, without any wish or will to do so, yields to the necessity, very much as the proud man of the world yields to the pressure when events which he has assumed to direct growtoo mighty for his hand and bear him away in their rush and tumult,—or as a father—to use a yet stronger and more painful image—submits with a groan and a prayer when the child of his dear love shuts the heart against him and breaks away from that tender control which it has been alike his duty and his pleasure to supply. Some of our mental children, especially when they are so real that time, place and circumstance cannot be made for them at will, are sadly unmanageable; and this instance furnishes an illustration which will be better understood at a later period. Acts may yet be recorded, while yet acts remain to record; but the heart closes, motives become buried in obscurity, and the narrator grows to be little more than a mere insignificant, powerless chronicler of events without connection and actions without explanation.
Taking up his quarters at the Fifth Avenue Hotel on Wednesday, this man, on Friday, the third of July, while the city was in agonized anxiety over the conflicting accounts of Meade's first battle of the day before, and while the black frames for the Fourth of July fireworks were being erected in front of the City Hall in the Park, with some uncertainty in the minds of the workmen whether they would not be used for a pyrotechnic display over the death-throe of the nation,—this man, Carlton Brand, took one of the omnibuses of the Fifth Avenue line passing the door of his hotel, alighted at the corner of Fulton Street and Broadway, walked down to the Bowling Green and entered the office of the Cunard Steamships fronting that faded relic of the Colonial splendors of New York. When he emerged from the office, fifteen minutes later, the cash-box of the British and North American Royal Mail Steamship Company was the richer by many broad pieces of American gold, and Carlton Brand bore, folded away in his wallet, one of those costly little pearl-white wings on which the birds of passage bear themselves over the Atlantic. It was evident that he was about to desert his country—that country for which he had before refused tofight,—to desert it at the very moment when its fate before God and the world seemed to hang trembling in the balance.
Coming out from the office of the Steamship Company, apparently wooed by the breeze from the North River, the lawyer bent his steps in that direction as if intending to make the tour of the shipping at the piers and resume his conveyance at some point higher up the town. Past two or three of the piers; and the dense black smoke pouring out from the funnels of one of the transport steamers on the eve of departure for the South with troops and munitions, seemed to attract his attention. He walked down the dock and observed more closely the movements on and around the vessel. The black smoke still rolled out, and steam was hissing from the escape-valves. Heavy wagons were discharging boxes at the gangway, and with much puffing and clatter a donkey-engine was hoisting them on board. A marine stood at the plank, bayonetted musket on shoulder, and close behind him an officer. To the civil inquiry of the lawyer, how long before the steamer would sail, the sentry replied that she was then steaming-up and would probably leave within a few hours; and to a request to be allowed to come on board and see the arrangements of a government transport on the eve of sailing, the officer, after a moment's glance at the unimpeachable dress and appearance of the visitor, assented with the stately bow of his profession.
It certainly seemed strange that on that blazing day, when his errand at the Hudson side of the city had been to inhale the cool breeze from the river, Carlton Brand, within a moment after stepping on board the transport, should have ignored all the details of decks, spars, cabins, and even machinery, and descended the narrow stair-ways, little more than ladders, leading down to those flaming intestines of the ship from which the hot air crept up through the companion-ways like breaths from some roasting and agonized monster. Yet so it was; and regardless alike of the heat which fevered his lips and the greasy rails upon which he soiled his gloves andrisked the smirching of his spotless summer garments, the lawyer pressed down to the fire-room, where the stokers were sweating great drops of perspiration that rolled down like beads from their broiled foreheads—where the coal was rattling and crashing as it was thrown forward, then crackling and hissing at its first contact with the flame, as it was dashed into the midst of the sweltering furnaces. Down, until he stood before those mighty furnaces and caught blinding glimpses, as the firemen momentarily opened the doors to dash in still other tons of the crackling coal of what seemed little less than a ship's-cargo of the fuel, seething, raging and lowing in such a heat that it made the old fancy of the lower pit no longer a dream but a horrible present reality.
"Terrible work for hot weather, I should think," said the lawyer, when the shovels were still for a moment and the great fires raged, roared and crackled within. He seemed to feel the necessity of saying something to do away with the impression of his being a sulky intruder,—and was addressing one of the bronzed old stokers who had paused to wipe from his grimy brow the sweat that was actually pouring into his eyes and blinding him.
"Yes, hot enough while we are lying at the dock," answered the stoker.
"Why hotter now than at any other time?" asked the lawyer, who had probably never happened to study that peculiar philosophy, simply because he had never been thrown into contact with it.
"Why? oh, Lord bless you!—because we are lying still, now, and there is no draught. When we are going through the water, and of course through the air, the motion makes a draught and we do not more thanhalfroast."
"Then it never getsverycool down here?" was the next inquiry.
"Notvery!" answered the fireman, sententiously. "But we never have the worst of these hot fires," he continued,answering something that had not been spoken but that seemed to be in the face of his auditor.
"Who then?"
"The passengers—at least some of them—on board any steamer that carries them over sea or down the coast."
"You mean when they—when the steamers take fire and burn?" The question was asked in what seemed to be a hurried and troubled voice; and had not the reflected glow from the furnace made every thing red under its light, there might have been seen a face of ghastly white contrasting with the dark and grimy one so near.
"No!" and the stoker laughed. "I did not mean that—only the thought of it. Steamers do not burnveryoften—not half so often as I should think they would, the way they are built, and with a whole Pennsylvania coal-mine on fire inside of them at once. When they do go, though, they make things howl! No slow burning, as there is sometimes on sailing-vessels, so that they can batten down the hatches and keep the fire under until there is a chance of help: every thing goes in a moment, and all is over in an hour—iron steamer or wood, very little difference."
"Horrible!" said the lawyer. The word seemed forced from him, and there could not be a doubt that he was at the moment fancying some terrible reality.
"Yes, horrible enough!" answered the stoker. "But what I was speaking of, is the foolish habit that passengers have—I have seen it often in crossing the Atlantic—of coming down into the fire-room very soon after they start, and taking a look at the furnaces. A good many of them never sleep a wink afterwards, during the whole voyage, I believe, thinking of that mass of red-hot coal lying in the middle of the ship, and wonderingwhenshe is going to burn. They are fools to come down at all: if they would just keep out of the way they would never know how badly it looks, and then at least they would never be burned until their time came!"
Just then the raging monster within seemed to demandmore blazing food, and the stoker turned away to attend to his duty. Had he remained conversing one moment longer, he might have seen Carlton Brand totter back against the bulk-head of the fire-room, literally gasping for breath—then grapple for the railing of the stairs, and ascend the steps with the staggering motion of a sick or drunken man, breathing heavily and giving painful indications of being on the verge of falling insensible.
When the lawyer again emerged to the air of the deck, his face was ghastly white, and he seemed altogether strangely altered since the moment of his descent into those regions of fire and grime and terrible suggestion. What had so changed him?—the heat, choking his lungs and preying upon a frame unaccustomed to it?—or had the curse of his nature again found him out, in the low of the furnaces and the heedless conversation of the fireman? and did he remember that between himself and even that flight beyond the sea which only could shut out from his ears the voice of contempt and the cry of a neglected country, there yet lay the peril of the Amazon and the Austria?
This occurred on Friday the third of July; and between that day and the Sunday following there was nothing in the movements of the sojourner at the Fifth Avenue, worthy of special record. But on that Sunday afternoon, perhaps at the very hour when Kitty Hood, in one spot of that section of country which had been his old home, was glorying over her lover's having been at Gettysburgh,—and when Robert Brand, in another, was writhing and cursing over the absence of his son from the same great battle,—an incident took place at the hotel, apparently trivial, but which may subsequently be found to have exercised no slight influence on the fortunes of some of the different persons named in this chronicle. Unfortunately, again, over this little event hangs a mist and a shadow, and only slight glimpses can be obtained of what afterwards proved to be of such unsuspected importance.
On that Sunday afternoon, at about two o'clock, CarltonBrand went down from his room to the office of the hotel, to exchange a few words with the clerk, and to secure one of the battle-extras which he had just heard from his window cried in the street. Knots of men, guests, or passers-by, driven in by the pouring rain without, filled the long hall, every third holding a newspaper, every group in more or less animated conversation, and the one topic that great conflict which had just bloomed out into a great victory. The lawyer seemed to have company enough in his own thoughts, and did not join any of the groups. He secured his extra, transacted his brief business at the desk, and returned immediately upstairs. The moment after he had left the desk, a young man advanced from one of the groups near the door, asked a question of the clerk, was answered, overran a few pages of the register with eye and finger, and then passed upstairs under the guidance of a servant.
Carlton Brand had already thrown off coat and boots again, and was sitting at the open window in dressing-gown and slippers, glancing over the sensation-headings of the extra which gave the particulars of the Waterloo of Secessia,—when there was a tap at the door. Stepping hastily thither and opening it, with a muttered wonder why he could not be left alone to his reading, a well-known figure stepped into the room and one of his Philadelphia bar-intimates—perhaps the nearest to a confidential friend in the whole profession, took him by the hand. For an instant the occupant of the room seemed to be displeased at the intrusion and an expression of annoyance flitted over his face; but old friendship was evidently too powerful even for shame and lacerated feeling, and the next instant he had cordially returned the grasp.
The new-comer, strangely enough, bore no slight resemblance to Carlton Brand. We say strangely, because the lawyer was by no means such a person, in general appearance, as could be readily duplicated. Henry Thornton, his professional brother, had the same tall, lithe figure withevidence of great agility, the same mould of countenance in many respects, and with eyes of hazel only a shade darker than Brand's. But here the resemblance, which might otherwise have been extraordinary, became slighter and eventually disappeared. His complexion was much darker, even brown, from chin to forehead, indicating Southern blood or residence. His hair, curling a little, was of very dark brown, almost black; and his heavy moustache, the only beard he wore, was so nearly black as generally to pass under that designation. In spite of the similarity of form and feature, it may be imagined that these differences told very strongly on the general effect produced by the two men on the mere casual observer; and while there was that indefinable something in the face of Carlton Brand, to which attention has before been called, denoting intellect and true nobility of soul, accompanied by an occasional pitiable weakness or want of self-assertion of the full manhood, there was that quite as plainly to be read in the face of Henry Thornton, which told of dauntless courage and iron will, a brain busy and scheming if not even plotting, and powers which might not always be turned to the service of the candid, the open and the honorable. Lavater would have thought, looking at his face—Well for him and for the world if what he wills is in consonance with honor and justice, for what he wills he will pursue with the unfaltering courage of the lion and the untiring determination of the sleuth-hound!
But Nature, giving to these two men who held no known relationship whatever, so striking a resemblance in some particulars and so great a dissimilarity in others—had not quite ended her freak of comparison. It is doubtful whether either was fully aware of the fact, but the similarity between the tones of their voices, in ordinary times, was quite as marked as that between certain physical features; and any person standing that day without the door, when the two had entered into conversation, might have been puzzled to know whether two persons were really speaking or one wascarrying on a monologue. This, only at ordinary times: Thornton's voice was much steadier and more uniform under feeling, and it never broke into tones so low and melancholy as that of the other, when influenced by temporary depression.
Such was Carlton Brand's visitor on that Sunday afternoon, and he it was who but the moment after was seated in the proffered chair near the window and chatting upon current topics with as much nonchalance as if he had merely called upon his entertainer at his little office on Sixth Street, Philadelphia, instead of visiting him at a hotel in a distant city.
There was a little table standing between the two windows of the room and within reach of Thornton as he sat. On the table lay part of that miscellaneous collection of articles which every careless bachelor will persist in scattering about his room at the hotel; and at the edge of what may be called the pile lay a paper more than half unfolded, which caught the observant eye of the visitor. With a quick: "Will you allow me?" which brought an affirmative response, he reached over, took up the paper, unfolded it and read a receipt for a first cabin passage in the Cunard Mail Steamship to sail from New York to Liverpool, on the 8th July, for which $130.50 had been paid by Mr. Carlton Brand.
"The Cunarder for Liverpool next Wednesday," he said, when he had finished running his eye over the passage-ticket.
"Yes," answered the owner, and he answered nothing more.
A strange expression passed over the face of his interrogator—an expression so doubtful that even Lavater, or any other man pretending to read the human countenance like an open book, might have been puzzled to say whether it conveyed pleasure, scorn, wonder, or any one of the thousand different feelings whose outward show glints over our faces as often and as transiently as the cloud-shadows floating over the mountain woods or the mottled sunshine flickering over the wheat-fields. There was something there—somethingwhich the other did not appear to notice; and with that fact we must be content.
Five minutes later, Carlton Brand, through the medium of words growing out of the discovery of the passage-ticket, was in confidential conversation with Henry Thornton with reference to the disgrace which had driven him from home and must make him an exile for years if not forever. It may have been a serious weakness, towards one who had never been even on terms of speaking acquaintance with her, to talk to him of Margaret Hayley and to confess the shameful dismissal which he had received. But Henry Thornton knew of the Hayleys if he did not claim an acquaintance with them; he had it in his power to impart information of them and their probable movements during the summer, which the other might have found difficulty in obtaining through any other means; and perhaps that knowledge gave some excuse for reciprocal confidence. At all events that confidence was given, and it elicited a return of apparently equal candor. Before the separation took place, at the end of an interview which lasted more than an hour, a strange bond seemed to have been established and cemented between the two lawyers, very different from any which official intercourse can often rivet. That interview, in fact, appeared to have produced marked effects upon both, for while on the face of Henry Thornton, as he rose to take his farewell, there was a look of entire satisfaction that could not have been without a meaning more or less creditable,—there was in the eye of Carlton Brand less of that troubled expression which had been for days resting there like a shadow, and he breathed as if a weight had been lifted from his breast. To one this new satisfaction and lightness of heart may have been no false presage: to the other, what an omen of unsuspected evil, disaster and death!
They parted at the door of the lawyer's room, with a much warmer grasp of the hand than that with which they had met little more than a hour before; and each held the palm of theother in his for a moment, as those should do who have however slight a bond in common and between whom the waves of a whole wide ocean are so soon to roll.
"A pleasant voyage and a happy return!" said the one, on the threshold.
"A pleasant summer to you, wherever you are!" was the reply of the other.
So parted, after that brief meeting, Henry Thornton and Carlton Brand. The bearer of that latter name, once so honored but now holding so doubtful a position, left New York by the Cunarder Scotia from Jersey City on Wednesday the 8th of July, looking his last that evening from the deck of his steamer, on the dim blue line of the Highlands—a fading speck of that native land that the fates had ordained he should never see again with his living eyes! And as at this moment we lose sight of him for the time, to trace the fortunes of others remaining on this side of the Atlantic, it may be well to say that his outward voyage must have been a safe and prosperous one, for there was duly registered as having arrived at Liverpool, on the twentieth of July, (a date which it may afterwards be important to remember) "Carlton Brand, Philadelphia."